An inaccurate headline cropped from a valid claim has now been repeated in Parliament by Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith. Full Fact unearths the full story on comparative rates of jobless households.

UPDATE: We are pleased to note that since being alerted to this erroneous claim by Full Fact, Iain Duncan Smith has corrected the Commons record. It now correctly states that Britain has “one of the highest rates of jobless households in Europe’s major economies.”

The Claim

“Britain has the highest rate of jobless households in Europe.” Iain Duncan Smith, Work and Pensions Secretary, House of Commons 11 October 2010.

Background

Full Fact pointed out in yesterday’s blog that a statistic suggesting high numbers of workless households in Britain had been abbreviated to the point of inaccuracy.

We were concerned that following a headline in the Telegraph erroneously proclaiming that Britain has “the highest number of workless households in Europe” was in danger of diffusing unscrutinised into the public debate.

Sure enough, the claim has already popped up in no less an arena than the House of Commons.

The CPS report ‘More Producers Needed’ points to data suggesting that the UK has “one of the highest ratios of workless households in the EU”, and “the highest incidence of adults in workless households of the six largest EU economies.”

But nowhere do the CPS claim that Britain actually tops this ignomonious league table, for the simple reason that we don’t.

The Eurostat data has four EU member-states – Belgium, Ireland, Hungary and Lithuania – performing worse than Britain, along with several other non-EU countries in Europe.

Britain does have the highest rate of workless households of Europe’s six largest national economies – but extend the elite to allow a seventh into the fold, and the UK is pipped by Belgium.

Even if Mr Duncan Smith had couched his statistic in the same terms as the CPS, there would be reasons to treat such a claim with caution.